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Anniversary

The deal was…we weren’t supposed to buy anything for each other for our anniversary…which I think we can all agree was a set up. Luckily, I own a printing press and my wife and kids were heading across the state for a few days. It was the perfect time to try something new. Actually, it was my wife’s idea. She had been telling me a few days before she left that she needed a nice journal to write down her thoughts and inspirations.

So, I did a little research…and then went shopping. Muskegon County is not the hotbed of printing supplies and I didn’t have time to order anything, so my options for paper, cover materials, and thread were limited. I found some nice water color paper, picked out a set of 8×10 photo mats to use as a cover, found some heavy thread and bees wax. What could be easier…

I didn’t want the journal to be blank. I know journals are for writing and need a lot of blank space, but I wanted it this journal to be different (it was to be an anniversary present after all). So, I chose a poem I liked and decided to put one line of the poem on the back of every other page…

It turns out that printing one line of a poem per page can take a lot of time…a lot of time, but I think it was worth it.

For the binding, I decided to try a Coptic Binding. I’d never tried one before, but a little research, a few videos, and a Woodlock station on Pandora produce a fairly good result in a couple of hours. The binding was, perhaps, a little loose, but the final journal looked…well, like a beautiful gift.

There was a problem, though…I needed something to put it in. I was off to the store again…looking for a gift bag, or wrapping paper, or something. I came home with a proof box and some sheets of cork. I lined the box with the cork and mounted a copy of the print on the journal on the lid.

The final product, I think, turned out quite well. The best part was that I didn’t buy a gift for our anniversary.